I think it depends on the PHD and the real world experience.

There's a quote I kinda forgot, but it goes something like:

"Did you experience the same thing 10 times, or did you experience 10 years worth?"

And I think this is true for a lot of real world experience, you don't necessarily have 10 year of it even though you've worked 10 years, you have 10 times the same experience.

Could you please not post flamebait to HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Political science isn't, at all, mindless, and there are focus areas within it that are extremely rigorous either elitist or analytically or both.

OTOH, there's not a lot of places where a PoliSci Ph.D. would substitute for industry experience (or, for that matter, vice versa.) If you want to substitute an academic degree in that general space for “industry” experience, you go for public policy and/or public administration (or, arguably, law), not political science.

Yes, all PhDs are equal. But some are more equal than others.

Which is funny, because the lack of government <-> academic information transfer is so small that any PoliSci PhD has an immediate competitive advantage in almost any bureaucratic setting (this is true at the federal and local levels).

A PhD in government pretty much guarantees that you'll be retiring after a thirty year career as a GS-15 or SES. A 150k salary plus benefits may not be high for some STEM fields, but it's definitely not something to look down on.